Bev Vincent

– by Bev Vincent

Most of what I’ve written about here at Storytellers Unplugged has been about writing. However, writers are also voracious readers. It’s hard to imagine a writer who doesn’t consume books at an impressive pace.

I started young, a preschooler reading road signs on family vacations, much to my parents’ chagrin. A few years later, I picked up copies of The Jungle Book and Tales of Mystery and Imagination in a discount bin on one of those trips. The former I must have read, but the latter had a profound impact. Poe’s short stories loom large in my memory—they seem almost as long as novellas in my recollection, and I’m always astonished when I go back to reread one and discover again how brief they were.

I moved on to the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie, went through my science fiction and fantasy stage when I started university, switched to horror in my early twenties, but always went back to my first love, which is crime fiction. Anyone who follows my book reviews on Onyx Reviews will probably know that the majority of what I read falls into that genre.

As an adolescent, I was the guy who always had a paperback in his back pocket, even at school dances. During a two-year period when I lived abroad, I read nearly 200 books. The walls of our house are lined with bookshelves, and my to-be-read pile has evolved into to-be-read shelves and is now almost a to-be-read wall. I can read anywhere, and can easily put a book down in the middle of a chapter, paragraph or even a sentence if the situation demands.

As writers, we spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. We usually read and revise our own drafts that way. Our colleagues and friends send us electronic copies of their works, which we often read from the screen as well. As a group, we’re probably more likely to read at length on a computer than a general audience. We may gripe and complain about it, but we do it as a matter of course.

Two weeks ago, I received a Kindle 2 as a gift. It was my idea, however, having seen someone using one in the airport on a recent trip. I never travel without at least two or three books, since I can often read an entire novel on one leg of a journey. Books weigh a lot, and they take up space. The Kindle is light and even smaller than I imagined. Less than 1 cm thick, it can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500-2000 books. If you run out of things to read, you can go online with it and buy a new book and have it in your hands within a minute (so long as you’re in the US—the wireless network doesn’t work anywhere else, at present).

My main trepidation was the reading experience. I’m not a big fan of reading from the computer screen, despite what I wrote above. I often print out documents longer than a dozen or so pages so I can read them in comfort away from my desk. However, the Kindle affords me that possibility. I can read from it in bed, on the couch, in the car, in the back yard—hell, even in the hot tub if I’m careful.

The screen is a bit smaller than a standard paperback page, but the text is very legible and you can increase the text size if you need to. If you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can just move the cursor over it and the definition pops up at the bottom of the page, because there’s a built-in dictionary. If you’re really curious, you can enable the free wireless and look something up on Google or Wikipedia. It’s not blazingly fast as a browser, and you have to do a fair amount of paging around, but it satisfies my innate curiosity. I’m always looking stuff up, and now I can do it right from my book. You can create bookmarks, search for specific text, and add notes to any document. The clunkiest thing about the Kindle is the process of scanning back a few pages to pick up a detail you think you might have missed—you have to go one page at a time, one click at a time. Not a big deal, but not as easy as flipping a few “real” pages.

I’ve become a rapid convert. I suspect I’ll do the bulk of my reading from the Kindle in the future. Amazon has a mechanism where you shoot them an e-mail with an attached html file or Word doc (PDF is also supported, but it is still experimental owing to the rigid formatting of PDF files) and they return a file in the right format for the Kindle, which you can then transfer over by USB (for free) or they will send it to the Kindle by wireless (for 15 cents). I transferred the manuscript of my most recent novel to it so I’ll have it on hand when I talk to my agent. I also had a friend send me an electronic ARC of her upcoming book. If I could convince publishers to send me review copies this way, I’d be a happy camper.

There was a time when I thought I’d reread books but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that such a privilege will be reserved for only a special subset of books. There are simply too many new books to read to spend precious time with ones I’ve already read. My recent trend has been to buy a book, read it and sell it while it still has some resale value. With NY Times bestsellers costing less than $10 for the Kindle, the net cost is about the same. I may also be inspired to tackle some of the classic novels I’ve always wanted to read—many of which are free for Kindle.

I still love physical books, the smell of the paper, the whisper of the pages turning, the texture of the rough edges and the embossed covers. But in the end it’s more about the words than the package and I’m perfectly willing to give up the pleasure of holding many books in physical form. The environment will thank me for it, I suppose, since I have probably clear cut a small forest over the course of my life due to the vast number of books I’ve purchased.

Besides, I don’t want to have to build an extension to the house just to house the next decade’s worth of books.

– Bev Vincent

I received a surprising e-mail a few weeks ago from a grade eleven student at a magnet school in Nashville. As part of an English class on critical thinking, their teacher had assigned them my short story “One of Those Weeks” from the anthology From the Borderlands (originally Borderlands 5).

This isn’t the first time one of my stories has been read in an English class, but it’s the first time where I have absolutely no association with the teacher, the students, or the school. A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak to the Creative Writing class at the local high school. My daughter graduated from that school, so I knew the teacher. There was a connection that led to that speaking gig. In that case, the class read “Harming Obsession,” and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with them about the story and answer their questions. In this recent situation, however, I have no idea whatsoever what led the teacher to pick my story.

Here’s the part of the essay where I digress from my message and harp on something we repeat over and over, often without feeling like we’ve conveyed the message. From the Borderlands was a Time Warner paperback. I don’t know its sales figures, but it spent one glorious week on the USA Today Top 150 Books list, coming in at #82. I used to see the book in airports all the time, and even found it on the shelf at our local grocery store. In brief, it got serious distribution. I’d be willing to bet that more people saw this story than saw all of my other stories at that point combined. Though none of us got rich off that project, this was an instance of real exposure. An editor called me up to ask whether I had a novel.

And a class several states away studied my story in their class. The students were asked to come up with theories about the meaning of its ending. They presented numerous interpretations of the story, some of them intriguing to me because they certainly weren’t in my conscious mind when I wrote it—but whose to say that I wasn’t thinking that way at some level?

The student who volunteered to contact me believed it was possible that I had written the story primarily to create the type of discussion and thinking they were undertaking. That gave me a lot more credit than I was due—though I didn’t tell them that.

I was more than happy to take some time to respond to the e-mail and subsequent letter to discuss the story with the class. However, in formulating my answer, I discovered that the story meant something different to me now than it did at the time I wrote it. I identified a subtext that seemed obvious, but one that I’d never considered before.

My daughter is an English/Creative Writing major at university so, over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to read her essays on the subject of interpretation, and on the various intents of works. There is the author’s intent, and the interpretation that each reader assigns to the text, all equally valid, and finally there is the abstract notion of the story’s intent, as if it had a consciousness of its own. Until recently, I dismissed that concept as effete intellectualism, the realm of lit. crit. researchers looking for high-minded concepts to make themselves seem important.

By revisiting “One of Those Weeks” several years after it was written, edited, revised and published, I discovered that the story might indeed have its own intent as an entity separate from me, the author. One of the best encapsulations of the story I read came from a reviewer, who was able to summarize its essence in a cleverly crafted and insightful sentence. I liked that analysis so much that I’ve often used it when discussing the story.

However, in 2008, five years after the story first appeared, I see in it something completely different. Things that I’ve experienced in the interim opened my eyes to new interpretations of something I wrote before having those experiences. It still all sounds a little artsy-fartsy to me, but I’m more of a believer in the story as an abstract entity than before.

Try rereading some of your older works, even if you think you’re completely familiar with them. You might discover that your past self can send a message through time to your present self. It’s surprising and delightful when that happens.

 

 

In 2000, I was just getting underway as a writer. I was a member of an online critique group and starting to gain enough confidence to submit my short fiction. I heard that an online magazine called The Harrow was having a Halloween contest with $50 and publication as prizes. A few days later, I saw an episode of 60 Minutes or 20/20 when I saw a segment about an obsessive compulsive disorder called “harming obsession.” While I watched, all I could think was: What would happen to a person with this disorder if he was out driving on Halloween night? And thus was born the story that follows.

The story took first place in the contest, and was published online with a neat illustration by GAK. It was later reprinted in the anthology Octoberland (Flesh and Blood Press, 2002) and was my first fiction appearance in Cemetery Dance magazine. It’s one of the stories that has generated the most response from readers of all my short works. I thought it was time to share it for Halloween.

Without further ado, here is “Harming Obsession.” A podcast version, read by me, is also available at Podango. Comments appreciated.

Harming Obsession

By Bev Vincent

It had been a gentle bump.

A small jolt.

Surely too minor to have been caused by a child.

So many small children were running around on this dark night, though. What if it had been a child and not a pothole or a cardboard box?

It could have been a child. In the darkness, the trick-or-treaters were well camouflaged by their black vampire and witch costumes.

It could have been.

What if it was?

What if?

This wasn’t the first time Victor thought he might have hit someone with his car. Every time—and there were days when it happened on a dozen or more occasions—he had to go back to the scene to convince himself it was only his imagination.

His compulsion.

Sometimes he spent fifteen or twenty minutes combing through ditches and hedges, adrenaline rushing through his veins, awash in guilt at the possibility that he might have carelessly caused a death. Often he returned a second or third time to reassure himself that he hadn’t overlooked something.

Victor stopped the car in the middle of the road. He had never struck anyone. Every time he went to look, there was no evidence of an accident.

What if it had been real this time? All those other times didn’t matter. What if a child cloaked in a dark costume, too preoccupied with tricks and treats to pay attention, had gotten too close to his car? What if—even now—he or she lay in the road behind him, a small body surrounded by candy that had tumbled out of a plastic orange jack-o-lantern?

Bleeding, suffering, dying?

The more Victor thought about it, the more convinced he became that it hadn’t been a simple bump in the road. It felt different.

It must have been a child.

So many of them out tonight, and they weren’t paying attention. They never did, but especially not tonight. It made driving nerve-racking.

He swore under his breath as his heart throbbed in his ears. Why was he out here on a night like this? It was crazy. Eleanor knew how he got when he was driving, but she had insisted. They were running low on candy, and it was up to him to get more.

His hands clutched the steering wheel while sinews stood out on either side of his neck. Sweat beaded on his brow, even though it was one of the coldest autumn nights yet. Risk of frost, the forecast had said, and here he was sweating in his car.

Resigned to the inevitable, Victor opened the door and stepped into the brisk night. His flashlight was in a pocket on the driver’s door where he always kept it. This wasn’t the first time he had needed to search the roadside in the dark.

It probably wouldn’t be the last.

It’s just my OCD talking, he chided himself. His therapist encouraged him to stop fighting the obsessive-compulsive disorder by talking back to it to remove its power over him, but that hadn’t worked. “Harming obsession” was the official diagnosis. “Hit ‘n Run” disease. He knew that a chemical imbalance in his brain was responsible for his feelings of guilt over something that hadn’t happened.

Probably hadn’t happened.

But what if? It was possible, wasn’t it?

And the bump had felt . . . different.

It could easily have been a small child, crushed beneath his back wheel, now lying mangled on the roadside.

Victor turned on the flashlight and swept its intense beam back and forth across the street. He looked under the car to make sure that the child wasn’t trapped beneath, caught in the muffler or the axle.

Nothing.

Nearby, a gaggle of costumed kids trick-or-treated from one house to the next, a jumble of legs, candy sacks and laughter.

No one paid attention to him as he continued his search, flashing the light over the median strip, which was covered with bushes and plants. The deep shadows among them could easily hide a child’s crushed figure.

No blood, no body.

He pushed his way through the hedges to the other side of the median for fear that he had struck the child hard enough to throw him or her all the way across the street.

Nothing.

He searched the same places again from the opposite direction, in case he had missed something. Back at the car, he looked underneath again.

Nothing.

His heart rate gradually returned to normal and a chill seeped into his bones. He chuffed a lungful of air and watched his breath vaporize.

Another false alarm. He got back into the car and slipped the flashlight into the door pocket.

An automobile horn beeped gently behind him as lights flashed across his rearview mirror. He was blocking the lane. Victor waved into the mirror, started the engine and continued down the street toward the convenience store.

The return trip was excruciating. Children scurried everywhere. Victor drove at a crawl, trying to focus his concentration on the street and his driving, but was continually distracted by the small people milling around on the sidewalks and at street crossings. They were so close to him. The exterior of the car chassis felt huge while at the same time the interior constricted around him.

The convenience store was a little over two miles from Victor’s house—not so convenient as all that, he raged—and it had taken him fifteen minutes to cover only half the distance back home. Walking might have been just as fast. He had stopped four times so far to look under his car, to sweep the road behind him after feeling a bump.

His mind raced. Still another mile to go. He was tempted to pull over, leave the car where it was and walk back home. Eleanor could come and get the blasted thing herself in the morning. It was her fault he was out here, after all.

Damned candy.

Huge raindrops ricocheted off the windshield, increasing rapidly to a steady drizzle. Victor shivered as he imagined spending the next twenty minutes or more plodding home through the frigid rain.

The windshield wipers scraped and moaned as he reduced his speed further and continued down the dark street.

Ahead, lights gleamed. In the darkness, compounded by the streaking rain on the windshield, Victor couldn’t be sure of their color. They seemed to be flashing. Red and blue. An accident?

The lights came from the opposite lane, across the median. As he drew close, he recognized the surroundings. It was where he had first stopped earlier this evening to search for an accident victim.

He had been right!

Deep inside, he had known he was right this time. Vindication gave him a perverse feeling of elation. All those times, stopping and checking, searching, crawling under the car, poking in the bushes, were suddenly validated. He wasn’t crazy after all.

He pulled onto the edge of the road and sat behind the wheel with the engine running, his wipers dragging across the windshield.

A fire truck, an ambulance and a tow truck had gathered at the scene in addition to the two police cars. Automobiles were backed up as far as he could see in the opposite direction. It had been over half an hour since he’d passed by this spot, so traffic had been tied up for a long time.

What should he do? Part of him wanted to go to the police, turn himself in, proclaim his guilt. He could see himself doing that. He could also see the crowd turning on him. He had left a small child to die in the cold, dark street, rain pelting off her foam-rubber Halloween mask. He could picture rain puddled around her little body—he was sure it was a girl—as dissolving candy dyed the water red and purple.

He couldn’t see how he had missed the girl’s body, though. He had searched thoroughly. Three times, no less. Still, what was done, was done. He’d hit and he had run.

Now he needed to see if he was going to get caught.

Sitting on the roadside was probably not the best strategy to avoid the attention of the police. He put the car into gear and eased forward again.

As he drew even with the accident scene, he tried to adopt an appropriate mixture of interest and indifference. If he ignored the accident altogether, that would certainly be noticed and marked. If he showed too much interest, that, too, would be suspicious.

Only when the wrecker maneuvered to hook up to a damaged car did Victor realize that this was not a hit-and-run scene but rather a routine traffic mishap. One car had rear-ended another. Quite solidly, from the look of it. The hood of the rearmost car was badly buckled. Someone—perhaps the driver—stood on the roadside holding a towel to his forehead. In the brilliant beam from a police car floodlight, he thought he could see blood on the towel.

The scene gripped Victor’s attention. His mind raced. He hadn’t run anyone down!

He was so obsessed with the accident scene, a scene for which he was not responsible, that he wandered from his lane and brushed against the median curb. The front wheel scraped along the prominent concrete ridge, twisting the steering wheel in his hands. He fought to maintain control as the car jerked suddenly toward the ditch. Finally he straightened out, thankful that there had been no vehicles in the other lane. He had probably scraped the hell out of his front hubcap, but he was back in control.

He looked back at the accident scene, watching it as he eased along in the rainy darkness. The flashing lights reflected in his side and rearview mirrors, growing fainter in the gloom.

The car didn’t handle well on the rest of the trip home, but at least he didn’t have any more illusions that he had run someone down. The road was slick but smooth and there were no potholes or speed bumps to induce that gripping, inescapable certainty that he had hit someone.

He had likely inflicted significant damage on his car, though. Thrown the front end out of alignment, perhaps even ruined something in the undercarriage. His muffler, maybe, or the oilpan. He surveyed the array of gauges around the speedometer, but no warning lights were illuminated.

Tomorrow would be plenty of time to worry about that. He could take the car to the garage and get it checked out in the light of day.

He pulled into the driveway, slammed the transmission into park, grabbed the sack of candy from the seat beside him and locked the door as he got out.

The cold, unforgiving drizzle made Victor clutch his coat tightly around him as he walked the ten feet to the back door and its protective canopy. Jack-o-lanterns grinned back at him ghoulishly from the railing, the candles within fighting to stay alive against the rain and growing wind.

He opened the front door, stripped off his wet jacket and greeted the warmth within the house.

How good to be home after such an excruciating ordeal.

In the driveway, rainwater gathered around the wheels of his car.

The puddles on the driver’s side were slowly turning purple and green as candy spilling from the shredded pumpkin pail caught in the undercarriage dissolved.

On the passenger side, the water slowly turned crimson.